🔹 3. Evolutionary Explanations of Behaviour

📘 Notes

Overview
Evolutionary psychology explains behaviour as adaptive responses shaped by natural selection to enhance survival and reproduction. Behaviours are viewed as evolved mechanisms encoded genetically.

Key Concepts

• Adaptation: Traits that increase survival likelihood.
  
• Natural Selection: Differential survival of advantageous traits.
  
• Sexual Selection: Traits that increase reproductive success.
  

Key Study 1: Buss (1989)

• Aim: Investigate cross-cultural preferences in mate selection.
  
• Method: 10,000 participants across 37 cultures completed questionnaires.
  
• Findings: Women preferred financial stability; men preferred youth and physical attractiveness.
  
• Conclusion: Universal patterns reflect evolutionary pressures.
  
• Evaluation:
  
  • 👍 Large cross-cultural data.
    
  • 👎 Social desirability bias; gender role stereotypes.
    

Key Study 2: Curtis et al. (2004)

• Aim: Explore whether disgust evolved as a disease-avoidance mechanism.
  
• Findings: Stronger disgust response to disease-related images.
  
• Conclusion: Disgust has adaptive, evolutionary roots.
  
• Evaluation:
  👎Online survey limits control; 

👍large sample strengthens reliability.

💡 TOK Links To what extent is evolutionary psychology speculative rather than empirical? How do values and cultural assumptions shape scientific explanations of human nature?

🌍 Real-World Connections Explains modern stress, phobias, mate selection patterns, and parental investment.

❤️ CAS Links Debate or podcast: “Are human behaviours products of evolution or culture?”

🧪 IA Guidance Experimental replications of disgust-response studies (Curtis-style) possible within ethics.

🧠 Examiner Tips Always connect evolutionary theory to specific behaviours (e.g., disgust, attraction). Avoid teleological (goal-driven) language — natural selection has no intent.